Atlantis (1913)
Directed by August Blom

Film Review

It may be hard to believe today but there was a time, exactly a century ago in fact, when Denmark's film industry was the envy of the world.  Then, along with those of France and the United States, Denmark's pioneering filmmakers were developing the language of cinema, laying the foundation stones on which today's movie making industry is founded.  A key figure in this golden age of Danish cinema was August Blom, the head of production at the country's leading film company, Nordisk Film.  Between 1910 and 1925, Blom directed over one hundred films and perfected techniques which have become part of the universal lexicon of filmmaking.  Atlantis was one of his most ambitious films, the first superproduction made in Denmark and one that had a profound resonance with the most shocking human disaster of the day: the sinking of the RMS Titanic.

Atlantis was first released in Denmark in December 1913, just over a year and half after that fateful day in April 1912 when  theTitanic struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic, resulting in the loss of 1500 lives.  What is spooky is that the film was not based on this real-life disaster but an a novel of the same title by the Nobel Prize winning writer Gerhart Hauptmann.  Written between 1909 and 1911, the novel first appeared in print in serial form in March 1912, precisely one month before the RMS Titanic sank on her maiden voyage - on the same route taken by the fictitious liner SS Roland in the novel.  As in the case of the Titanic, a woefully inadequate number of lifeboats on the SS Roland results in a large contingent of the passengers and crew drowning or freezing to death in the cold Atlantic waters.  The similarity between the fictional disaster imagined by Hauptmann and the real thing that came along a few years later is both striking and chilling.

Such was the high profile given to the sinking of the Titanic in the popular press of the time that Blom's film could not escape attracting international attention.  Although Atlantis failed to recoup its astronomical production cost on its first release it became the most widely seen Danish film in history, although it was widely condemned for making capital out of a human tragedy (the film was banned outright in Norway).  In the midst of the First World War, Blom courted further controversy with another film that latched onto the Zeitgeist - The End of the World (1916), cinema's first full-on apocalyptic movie.

Whilst the sinking of an ocean liner is only one incident of many in Atlantis it is the most dramatic and the most impressively realised, a gloriously ambitious set-piece that consumed a large chunk of the film's budget.  Audiences of the time must have been appalled and amazed by such a convincing recreation of the real disaster that had filled the newspapers the previous year.  Even today, the sequence can hardly fail to impress, despite some obvious imperfections (the vessel sinking below the waves is clearly smaller than the real ship seen earlier - the budget presumably couldn't run to the expense of a full-size replica).  Blom uses the cross-cutting technique which he had pioneered to give the sequence an incredible sense of drama, rapidly cutting between panicking passengers and the sinking ship to capture the horror of the moment.  Camera movement, another of Blom's favourite techniques, heightens the sense of urgency and pandemonium, inducing a feeling of nausea in the spectator as he is transported into the midst of a fantastic orgy of abject terror.

What is perhaps most striking about the central set-piece of Atlantis is how utterly realistic is seems. It might almost be documentary footage of the sinking of the Titanic, and because it shot objectively, with none of the over-the-top dramatisation seen in later films featuring sinking ocean liners, it feels scarily authentic.  The rest of the film is imbued with the same uncomforting naturalism, the one notable departure being the short excursion to the lost underwater city in an eerie dream sequence.  The exterior location sequences of Berlin and New York City might have been lifted from a newsreel and offer a fascinating glimpse of both cities before WWI.  Blom's endlessly moving camera, with tracking shots from moving vehicles that are truly breathtaking, endow the film with a vertiginous sense of the vitality of the modern metropolis.  All this adds to startling modernity of the film.

Atlantis wasn't just ahead of its time on the cinematographic front, it was also highly sophisticated as a piece of drama.  The film's authors took the opportunity afforded them by its two hour runtime to develop realistic characters, rather than, as was more usual, fall back on the familiar stereotypes.  The main character - sympathetically played by Olaf Fønss, a major star of Danish and German cinema - is not your conventional romantic hero.   He's a driven scientist (in the field of bacteriology no less) and a devoted husband (married to a lunatic wife who threatens to disembowel him with her scissors).  He's also reckless and easily led astray by an over-active libido.  He's a fully-fledged character and yet - and this is the interesting part - he is completely passive, totally at the mercy of events.  He resembles a ball in a pinball machine, being knocked from pillar to post by forces beyond his control.  The secondary characters are also convincingly drawn representatives of their time, the most interesting being the entourage of artists that the hero encounters during his stay in New York.

The one character who doesn't quite ring true is the supposedly irresistible dancer Ingigerd.  One of the things that Gerhart Hauptmann stipulated in his contract with Nordisk was that two of the characters in his book would be played by the people who had inspired them.  This explains the slightly eccentric casting of Ida Orloff for the part of Ingigerd, even though she is clearly too old and too stout for the part.  The other cast member that Hauptmann foisted on the film was Charles Unthan, a man who had been born without arms - he plays the cabaret performer Arthur Stoss, a.k.a. the 'Armless Wonder'.  Unthan's presence in the film is unnecessary and today would doubtless be condemned as exploitative but it introduces a few welcome shots of humour, and the scene in which he plays cards and opens a wine bottle with his feet has to be seen to be believed.  Another noteworthy name in the cast is Mihály Kertész, who would later find fame and fortune in Hollywood as Michael Curtiz, the director of such classic movies as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Casablanca (1942).  Kertész/Curtiz appears briefly in a small supporting role, as a colleague of the main character in the Berlin sequence.  He was also engaged by Blom as an assistant director, sharing the workload with another future director of some renown, Robert Dinesen.  As the first in a long line of ocean liner disaster movies, Atlantis is definitely worth checking out.

Film Synopsis

Dr Friedrich von Kammacher is an eminent bacteriologist who is married to a woman who suffers from a severe mental disorder.  When his wife starts behaving in a dangerous manner von Kammacher has no option but to have her placed in an institution.  A second upset comes when the doctor's proposal for an innovative research programme is rejected by Berlin University.  Taking the advice of his parents, von Kammacher takes an extended holiday.  His first port of call is Berlin, where he falls under the spell of an exotic dancer, Ingigerd Hahlstrom.  The object of his infatuation is too busy being cosseted by her other male admirers to notice him, so he leaves for Paris.  In a newspaper, von Kammacher reads that Ingigerd is to travel to New York via the SS Roland, so he immediately books himself a berth on the same liner.  During the crossing, von Kammacher attempts to renew his acquaintance with Ingigerd, only to discover that she already has a boyfriend.  In his sleep, the doctor imagines he is visiting the lost city of Atlantis.  He awakes to discover that the SS Roland is sinking after the hull has been damaged in a collision.  In the ensuing panic most of the passengers and crew are drowned.   Von Kammacher and Ingigerd are among the few survivors who are able to get away in a lifeboat.  In New York, Ingigerd cannot agree to commit herself to one man, and so von Kammacher gives her up.  He meets with a friend, Willy Snyders, who brings him into contact with a community of artists.  This is how he comes to make the acquaintance of an amiable young sculptress named Eva Burns.  Whilst enjoying a few days' rest in a remote mountain cabin, the doctor receives a telegram notifying him that his wife has died.  The news is more than he can bear and immediately he succumbs to a delirium of sickness...